Sour Grapes Post Election 2012

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

A Mixed Culture Confederate Woman....

YEP... this is who I am.   For the first time... I looked at the Confederate Flag... and glimpsed into the life of my Great-Grandfather John Anderson....

Actually, I was browsing a friendly quilter website... she shared a quilt project for her brotherly.. a loving gesture and she quickly added an apology in case the flag symbol OFFENDED anyone!!!  And for the first time in my.. life I was not offended.... I actually identified with my past family history...

NOTE:::  a few days ago, I mailed off a request for the PENSION info in AR database for James Anderson....  good news hoepfully...

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Three or Two or TEA Political Parties.... !!!





Like I'm thinkin.... 
I'm living history.... and luvin it ! ! ! 

Change.... forwards or backwards ???

I am living in America.....   historical times.....

Monday, October 25, 2010

I am still a black woman in America ..

I remember Fiddler.....
 A child of the 60' thru 80's era.   The lens thru which I see Black history is tinted - indelibly. 


Take the controversey over Juan Williams, NPR, Fox News, MUSLIM Viewspoint, which sounded like how white folk see black dudes and think they are robbers and thieves and rapists.....


I've pondered the thing for days now.   The high and might white news commentators are spinning it.   What us - most often unheard of views are not being touted. 

Something is wrong with the CNN/Fox view of Juan Williams....

and Williams is ultimately wrong.  A bigger goal for Wms should have been to expose sometimes biased/racist attitudes felt by all... rather Fox is pawning him to right-wing conservatism... for which we just cannot vote for!   

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

This racist diatribe sounds like it comes from a tired lady, a lady on harmones to assist her in getting stable, and a lady who really does not care. She is obviously getting older, less patient, and less sensitive to the world we live in. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@  RACIAL EPITHET is nigger.......   with feelings of endearment -- blacks use the COLLOQUIAL TERM nigga.....  stated and signed off by Bkirk

Washington Post on Schlessinger

My columns misplaced... via a cut and print.... the statement below was from a viewer comment,,, for which I agree..Bkirk

string of n-words.... Some things You should keep to yourself!

I am stunned by this. The venom and emotionalism displayed by Dr. Laure is surprising. The under tone of resentment. The revelation of her views of racial discourse in American politics and life. Her insensitivity to Jade's (her caller's) predicament. The apology here should be to Jade. I don't think a general apology was needed, but as a counselor, WOW, she really missed the boat. She obviously has strong opinions regarding current racial discourse in America. And, if she feels, as she seemed to imply, that her views are middle of the road or neutral, there's is word I would like to offer to her. That word would be DENIAL! She managed to rant and rave about the NAACP and Black Activists, when all the poor caller wanted was help with her personal situation. Dr. Schlesinger was obviously unsympathetic and even implied that she brought it on herself by having an interracial marriage. The doctor goes on to mention all of her black associates as some sort of proof of her lack of racial bias. Any rational person listening to this would have to question her on this. Her raw emotion was palpable and far from neutral. And, hypothetically speaking, if I were black and, G_d forbid there was a racial conflict, where right-minded people, black and white, had to take action to stem the tide of hatred and violence, I would be terrified to have her in my foxhole.ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss














Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Thursday, July 22, 2010

TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY News..... Shirley Sherrod

They messed with the wrong generational black woman of 61 years! Another Rosa Parks speaks up.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Thursday called former federal official Shirley Sherrod to express "regret" over her ouster in the midst of a racially tinged firestorm that ensnared the White House, Agriculture Department, NAACP and a blogger.

Her Georgia Dad was Hosie Miller!

There was a “To Kill a Mockingbird” aspect to this story, where you had—and in that—of course, that great story by Harper Lee, an historic woman blaming a black man for a crime that didn‘t even exist. There was no crime in that case. In this case, you have a right-wing blogger who decided to smear a public official, and that got on Fox—the Fox Web site. No surprise there.

And that chain reaction led to the Department of Agriculture, up the chain of command to Tom Vilsack, who now admits that he told this woman to resign. Based on that fact alone, what does that tell you about American life, where a right-wing blogger with no editorial control, no editorial judgment or ethics, is able to smear somebody, have a major television network put that on their Web site within minutes, throw it out there without any editorial judgment or ethics at all, perhaps even a motive, a negative motive, smear this black woman, and then have an administration led by an African-American, somewhere down the chain of command, apparently now at the cabinet level, sack her because of what was decided by a right-wing blogger? What do you make of that state of affairs?

WADE HENDERSON, LEADERSHIP CONF. ON CIVIL & HUMAN RIGHTS : Chris, I have to say, first, your historic analogy between this incident and “To Kill a Mockingbird” is directly on point. Again, I think Harper Lee exposed a deep fissure in American society, the willingness to assume the worst of a black defendant, or in this instance, an African-American employee who was accused of racial bigotry, when in truth, the story that she told was precisely the opposite.

It was a story of personal redemption. It was a story of racial reconciliation. It was a story that should make us all proud to be Americans, having overcome a deep problem in American life regarding race and having moved beyond that in a way that reflects the kind of democracy we hope to achieve in the 21st century.

I think it‘s especially tragic that in this instance, a right-wing blogger in the case of Andrew Breitbart, choosing to establish a moral equivalency, if you will, between the NAACP because of its criticism of the Tea Party movement and trying to establish that the NAACP should be hoisted on its own petard because it was willing to tolerate racism within its own ranks.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Yep... we still be colored folk in america

WASHINGTON — The Tea Party political movement saw a major split over the weekend, with the National Tea Party Federation expelling a member group after its spokesman wrote an online post satirizing a fictional letter from what he called "Colored People" to President Abraham Lincoln.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

My many readings about my my heritage... my people . . .

A Social History of The American Negro
Author: Benjamin Brawley
1921

Excerpt:
Back on the shore a gray figure with strained gaze watched the ship fade away—an old woman sadly typical of the great African mother. With her vision she better than any one else perceived the meaning of it all. The men with hard faces who came to buy and sell might deceive others, but not her. In a great vague way she felt that something wrong had attacked the very heart of her people. She saw men wild with the whiskey of the Christian nations commit crimes undreamed of before. She did not like the coast towns; the girl who went thither came not home again, and a young man was lost to all that Africa held dear. In course of time she saw every native craft despised, and instead of the fabric that her own fingers wove--- her children yearned for the tinsel and the gewgaws of the trader. She cursed this man, and she called upon all her spirits to banish the evil. But when at last all was of no avail—when the strongest youth or the dearest maiden had gone—she went back to her hut and ate her heart out in the darkness. She wept for her children and would not be comforted because they were not

My life today.....

Thursday, June 3, 2010

:) This is how I feel today

In the midst of it all LORD !




A little Mammie-Fired Up.... wouldn't you say !! ?? !!!

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

I found hope for today.....



If we do not believe it is possible to live in peace, it will not happen.

If we do not believe it is possible to heal our planet, it will not be healed.

If we do not believe it is possible to create a world of respect and kindness, it will not one day exist.

"It is better to believe than to disbelieve; in so doing you bring everything to the realm of possibility."


~ Albert Einstein


I was re-reading old file documents.... cleaning and rearranging my workplace computer..... it's theraputic (as in re-organizing my life!)
Check the link below....
http://goodnessgraciousness.blogspot.com/search/label/Mind%20Body%20Spirit

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Do you want to know what's buggin' me?




That monstros-city (fun spelling) of an Oil Spill in the Gulf... Day 37 of something... LA, GA, MS.... geeeeesssssh.... daily reading of the Wall Street Journal.....


There's a need in me... to be green..... just as much as I know myself to be black.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010



Long after the smoldering remains from the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot cooled, a veil of secrecy hung over the tragedy for generations.

The event was omitted from U.S. and Oklahoma history books, but the terror remained alive in the minds of those who lived through the torment.
“Events from the Tulsa Disaster” is a chronicle of the aftermath by Tulsa resident Mary E. Jones Parrish. Her first-hand account was published in 1923 and is filled with stories from witnesses and victims sharing their perspectives on these tragic events.

Parrish’s book was for many years out of print. Now — thanks to funding from Anne and Henry Zarrow Family Foundation, the Maxine and Jack Zarrow Foundation and the Oklahoma Humanities Council — the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation has reprinted this historically important book. Copies were donated to Tulsa Community College, Tulsa Public Schools and the Tulsa City-County Library.

वहत गोइंग ओं ???

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Anybody else this BAAAD DUDE is lookin just too cool... that is toooooo normal?



While the New York Police are still to reach any conclusion regarding the responsibility for the attempted incendiary attack in the Times Square of New York on the evening of May 1, 2010, tribal sources in Pakistan suspect that it was a joint attempt by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), also known as the Islamic Jihad Group.

a naturalized U.S. citizen who recently spent five months in Pakistan, was arrested on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction charges that allege he tried to blow up the crude gasoline-and-propane bomb amid tourists and theatergoers Saturday evening.

He was in custody after being hauled off a Dubai-bound plane at Kennedy Airport that he had been able to board Monday night despite being placed on the federal "no-fly" list.


NEW YORK - Seized from a plane about to fly to the Middle East, a Pakistan-born man admitted training to make bombs at a terrorism camp in his native land before he rigged an SUV with a homemade device to explode in Times Square

Hi world

Black women speaks again.... I'm having fun.

folks wanted to know what we knew about the chemical dispersants that BP has been spraying over the surface of the slick, and which they are now spraying directly onto the leaks at deep ocean depths. Here's the bad oil!



The chemical agents used as dispersants work by reducing the tension between oil and water, thereby enhancing the natural process of dispersion that takes place when waves mix large numbers of small oil droplets into the water beneath a spill. To be effective, however, they must be used in a hurry -- within 12 to 48 hours after a spill according to the committee that wrote the new report -- before fluctuations in water temperature change the oil's viscosity, possibly turning it into a semi-solid that cannot be dispersed.

Here's the Good Oil Dispersing.... ahhhhh


The important thing to remember about chemical dispersants is that they do not reduce the total amount of oil entering the environment. There is a perception that chemical dispersants are like an industrial soap that somehow cleans the water of oil, and that is fundamentally untrue.
Chemical dispersants change the chemical and physical properties of oil, essentially breaking up oil that is congealed at the surface, and sending oil droplets down into the water column. (By dispersing oil into deeper waters, away from human eyes, dispersants can also have the welcome public relations effect of making the spill appear smaller). The primary objective of chemical dispersants is to avoid sending oil slicks into the nearshore marine environment.

http://www.oilspillsolutions.org/dispersant.htm ck the link!





Monday, April 5, 2010

MLK ~ January 15-1929 ~ April 4-1968

Lest we forget . . .

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

I Just Cannot help but correlate and reflect on the Civil Rights Era

Our God Is Marching On!                   MLK SPEECH March 25, 1965.       Montgomery, Ala.

My dear and abiding friends, Ralph Abernathy, and to all of the distinguished Americans seated here on the rostrum, my friends and co-workers of the state of Alabama, and to all of the freedom-loving people who have assembled here this afternoon from all over our nation and from all over the world: Last Sunday, more than eight thousand of us started on a mighty walk from Selma, Alabama. We have walked through desolate valleys and across the trying hills. We have walked on meandering highways and rested our bodies on rocky byways. Some of our faces are burned from the outpourings of the sweltering sun. Some have literally slept in the mud. We have been drenched by the rains. [Audience:] (Speak) Our bodies are tired and our feet are somewhat sore.


But today as I stand before you and think back over that great march, I can say, as Sister Pollard said—a seventy-year-old Negro woman who lived in this community during the bus boycott—and one day, she was asked while walking if she didn’t want to ride. And when she answered, "No," the person said, "Well, aren’t you tired?" And with her ungrammatical profundity, she said, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested." (Yes, sir. All right) And in a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired, (Yes, sir) but our souls are rested.

They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, (Well. Yes, sir. Talk) but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, "We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around." (Yes, sir. Speak) [Applause]

Now it is not an accident that one of the great marches of American history should terminate in Montgomery, Alabama. (Yes, sir) Just ten years ago, in this very city, a new philosophy was born of the Negro struggle. Montgomery was the first city in the South in which the entire Negro community united and squarely faced its age-old oppressors. (Yes, sir. Well) Out of this struggle, more than bus [de]segregation was won; a new idea, more powerful than guns or clubs was born. Negroes took it and carried it across the South in epic battles (Yes, sir. Speak) that electrified the nation (Well) and the world.

Yet, strangely, the climactic conflicts always were fought and won on Alabama soil. After Montgomery’s, heroic confrontations loomed up in Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and elsewhere. But not until the colossus of segregation was challenged in Birmingham did the conscience of America begin to bleed. White America was profoundly aroused by Birmingham because it witnessed the whole community of Negroes facing terror and brutality with majestic scorn and heroic courage. And from the wells of this democratic spirit, the nation finally forced Congress (Well) to write legislation (Yes, sir) in the hope that it would eradicate the stain of Birmingham. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave Negroes some part of their rightful dignity, (Speak, sir) but without the vote it was dignity without strength. (Yes, sir)

Once more the method of nonviolent resistance (Yes) was unsheathed from its scabbard, and once again an entire community was mobilized to confront the adversary. (Yes, sir) And again the brutality of a dying order shrieks across the land. Yet, Selma, Alabama, became a shining moment in the conscience of man. If the worst in American life lurked in its dark streets, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it. (Yes, sir. Speak) There never was a moment in American history (Yes, sir) more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger (Yes) at the side of its embattled Negroes.

The confrontation of good and evil compressed in the tiny community of Selma (Speak, speak) generated the massive power (Yes, sir. Yes, sir) to turn the whole nation to a new course. A president born in the South (Well) had the sensitivity to feel the will of the country, (Speak, sir) and in an address that will live in history as one of the most passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a president of our nation, he pledged the might of the federal government to cast off the centuries-old blight. President Johnson rightly praised the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation. (Yes, sir)

On our part we must pay our profound respects to the white Americans who cherish their democratic traditions over the ugly customs and privileges of generations and come forth boldly to join hands with us. (Yes, sir) From Montgomery to Birmingham, (Yes, sir) from Birmingham to Selma, (Yes, sir) from Selma back to Montgomery, (Yes) a trail wound in a circle long and often bloody, yet it has become a highway up from darkness. (Yes, sir) Alabama has tried to nurture and defend evil, but evil is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this state. (Yes, sir. Speak, sir)


So I stand before you this afternoon (Speak, sir. Well) with the conviction that segregation is on its deathbed in Alabama, and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral. (Go ahead. Yes, sir) [Applause]

Health Insurance Reform becomes law in the United States of America

Let us march on ballot boxes (Let us march)
until we send to our city councils (Yes, sir),
state legislatures, (Yes, sir)
and the United States Congress, (Yes, sir)
men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.



Let us march on ballot boxes (Let us march. March)
 until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda.   (Martin Luther King - "Our God Is Marching On!"   March 25, 1965. Montgomery, Ala.

Washington (CNN) -- President Obama on Tuesday  (March 23, 2010) signed into law a sweeping health care reform bill, the nation's most substantial social legislation in four decades, achieving a top priority of his administration.


Greeted by applause from enthusiastic supporters, he said, "Today after almost a century of trying; today, after over a year of debate; today, after all the votes have been tallied, health insurance reform becomes law in the United States of America."

"We are not a nation that scales back its aspirations," the president said. "We are not a nation that falls prey to doubt or mistrust. We don't fall prey to fear. We are not a nation that does what's easy. It's not who we are. It's not how we got here. We are a nation that faces its challenges and accepts its responsibilities."


Before the signing, Vice President Joe Biden, praising Obama's leadership in forging the legislation, said, "Mr. President, you've done what generations of not just ordinary, but great men and women have attempted to do. ... You delivered on a promise, a promise you made to all Americans when we moved into this building," the White House.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice

James Russell Lowell is right. "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own."


How long sir.... not long.....

Why ? ? ?   Because ..........The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice  
MLK   his "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely" . . . . Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never."  

Monday, March 22, 2010

OBAMACARE  
U.S. President Barack Obama is flanked by Vice President Joe Biden (L) as he makes a statement about the House of Representatives' final passage of health care legislation, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, March 21, 2010. Obama on Sunday hailed the House of Representatives vote for his sweeping healthcare plan as a victory for the American people that answered the call of history.





Today's vote answers the prayers of every American who has hoped deeply for something to be done about a healthcare system that works for insurance companies but not for ordinary people," Obama told reporters in the White House East Room.



He called the vote "another stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American dream" and said it would help people who lack insurance get access to coverage but would also help those who already have insurance.

"If you have health insurance this reform just gave you more control by reining the worst excesses and abuses of the insurance industry with some of the toughest consumer protections this country has ever known so that you are actually getting what you pay for," he said.

History being made again.... OBAMA STYLE....

Mar 22, 2010


The Washington Post: "House Democrats scored a historic victory in the century-long battle to reform the nation's health-care system late Sunday night. ... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues erupted in cheers and hugs as the votes were counted, while Republicans who had fought the Democratic efforts on health-care reform for more than a year appeared despondent. ... The debate has consumed Obama's first year in office, ... inflamed the partisanship that Obama pledged to tame when he campaigned for the White House and has limited Congress's ability to pass any other major legislation, at least until after the midterm elections in November. And it has sparked a citizens' revolt that reached the doors of the Capitol this weekend" (Murray and Montgomery, 3/22).


The New York Times: "With the 219-to-212 vote, the House gave final approval to legislation passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve. Thirty-four Democrats joined Republicans in voting against the bill." Following that vote, the House then "adopted a package of changes to [the Senate-passed measure] by a vote of 220 to 211. That package — agreed to in negotiations among House and Senate Democrats and the White House — now goes to the Senate for action as soon as this week" (Pear and Herszenhorn, 3/21).


The Los Angeles Times: "On the House floor, Democrats erupted into cheers of 'Yes, we can!' at 10:45 p.m. Eastern time as the decisive 216th 'yes' vote was recorded, capping a tortuous campaign that several senior lawmakers linked to the historic battle for civil rights two generations earlier. 'This is the Civil Rights Act of the 21st century,' said Democratic Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the top-ranking black member of the House." Meanwhile, "Angry protesters swarmed over the Capitol lawn throughout the day, cheering sympathetic Republicans who urged them on from the House balcony. They called for lawmakers to 'kill the bill' and warned of dire political consequences for Democrats who voted for the legislation. ... But after a final flurry of negotiating defused an intraparty dispute over abortion and locked down the last votes, Democratic lawmakers ... were celebrating the payoff of a monumental gamble" (Levey and Hook, 3/22).


USA Today has an interactive map of how each member voted. "Republicans who voted unanimously against the health care overhaul, along with 34 Democrats, predicted it would come back to bite Democrats at the polls — and in the form of repeal efforts as soon as next year" (Wolfe and Fritze, 3/22).



The Wall Street Journal: "It was a tumultuous sprint to the finish for legislation that has brought Washington many dramas over the last year, ranging from a Christmas Eve Senate vote to the surprise January election of Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown that upended Democrats' plans." The big changes sparked reaction from various groups, with opposition coming from the business community and insurers bracing to bear the heaviest regulations. "Hospitals, doctors, drug makers and the seniors group AARP backed the overhaul, saying it will reduce the growth of health costs and make sure no one goes without care" (Adamy and Hitt, 3/22).



The Christian Science Monitor: "The vote is being touted as the single most significant piece of domestic legislation to be passed by Congress since Medicare in 1965. Though Democrats and Republicans disagreed on whether it was for good or ill, most acknowledged that it was a historic day in American politics" (Sappenfield, 3/22

Thursday, March 18, 2010

I said it yesterday.... Tiger Woo,woo,woo !

Posted it on facebook...... the World was silent except for my brother who cheered him on to victory! 


POST:  my child is back. :) April 8 '10 is the Masters favorite with 4green jackets - Tiger Woo woo woo   (Nuff said...!!! :)



Controversial golf star Tiger Woods still has one supporter -- at least of his abilities as a golfer. In a brief interview on Fox News, President Barack Obama was asked about his thoughts on Tiger's return to the Masters next month.


At first, President Obama seemed taken aback by the question -- and understandably so, since he has some many other problems to worry about (such as health care) that the actions of a golfer don't seem so important. However, he did eventually give his thoughts: Tiger has acknowledged his faults to all of America, and anything else in his personal life is between him and Elin Nordegren to figure out. Nevertheless, he believes that Tiger will still be a "terrific golfer."

The Tiger Woods scandal has taken the TV world by storm, and many people expect his return to the Masters to be the highest-rated golf broadcast in the history of the sport. Since the event is heavily protected, it is unlikely that Tiger will be pushed into talking much about his personal life

Monday, March 15, 2010

In his autobiography, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, Hans J. Massaquoi gives us a detailed, first-hand account of growing up amidst daunting adversity.


Massaquoi was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany to a German nurse and an African diplomat’s son. He grew up an ordinary German boy, speaking Platt (Low German), wearing knickers, and, apart from the occasional taunt or curious stare, engaging in the same daily routines as his friends and schoolmates. He felt privileged to grow up in Germany, especially in Hamburg, “blessed with the most beautiful, the most exciting, and the most desirable hometown on the face of the earth.”

At first, Hitler’s arrival on Germany’s political scene was an exciting experience for the little boy everyone called Hans-Juergen. He admired the polished ranks of the SA and envied his friends who joined the Hitler Youth movement. In school, he and the other children were taught to revere the “Fuehrer.” Hans-Juergen was so enthralled that he asked his Tante (Aunt) Moeller to sew a swastika on his knit sweater.

Gradually, things turned for the worse. Massaquoi recounts how a sign suddenly barred him, an Afro-German child, from entering the playground. He was shocked and surprised to learn that one of his friends, Klaus, was Jewish and that he had to avoid any contact with him. (Klaus and his family committed suicide during the Kristallnacht riots of 1938.) His mother lost her job; Rassenschande was the reason. In school, Hans-Juergen routinely endured snide remarks and a barrage of the derogatory words, including Neger (Negro) and Mischling (mixed breed). As a “non-Aryan” Hans-Juergen was also barred from continuing high school and had to opt for vocational school instead.

This “all-out psychological warfare” took its toll. He started to loathe his African hair and blamed himself for his appearance. Still, he persevered, aided by the unfailing guidance and optimism of his mother and the support of a few friends and teachers. Reading became his survival tool, Joe Louis and Jesse Owens his new heroes. He attended dance school and came to represent the antithesis of a Hitler Youth -- a so-called “swingboy.” Due to his racial background, he was deemed unfit for military service, and Massaquoi and his mother were evacuated from Hamburg to the countryside after surviving some two hundred air attacks. There, Massaquoi witnessed prisoner convoys passing through the village on the way to the concentration camp Dora-Mittelbau.

His survival is a story of surprising contradictions: the NSDAP member who rescued him from an assault by Hitler Youths; the colleague who first criticized the Nazis and then accused Massaquoi of high treason. Growing up, he never knew who was friend or foe, and he survived day-to-day. Finally, in 1948 he left Germany for Liberia and later immigrated to the United States. Today, he lives in New Orleans, a retired managing editor of Ebony magazine.

Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany includes a prologue by the author and numerous photographs.

628 pages,37 b&w illustrations,  ISBN: 0-688-17155-9, Call no: DD78 .B55 M38 1999
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany’s government led by Adolf Hitler promoted a nationalism that combined territorial expansion with claims of biological superiority—an “Aryan master race”—and virulent antisemitism. Driven by a racist ideology legitimized by German scientists, the Nazis attempted to eliminate all of Europe’s Jews, ultimately killing six million in the Holocaust. Many others also became victims of persecution and murder in the Nazis’ campaign to cleanse German society of individuals viewed as threats to the “health” of the nation

Gunskirchen, Austria - May 4, 1945


This pamphlet was produced by the US Army after they liberated a concentration camp in Austria called Gunskirchen Lager. The 71st arrived just days before VE day.

The book recounts in detail, and with very graphic photos, the tragedy they found in the camp.

US Black Folk In Germany 1930's-1940's

In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler charged that “the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardization.”  (Afro Germans)
Adult African Germans were also victims. Both before and after World War I, many Africans came to Germany as students, artisans, entertainers, former soldiers, or low-level colonial officials, such as tax collectors, who had worked for the imperial colonial government. Hilarius (Lari) Gilges, a dancer by profession, was murdered by the SS in 1933, probably because he was black. Gilges' German wife later received restitution from a postwar German government for his murder by the Nazis.



Some African Americans, caught in German-occupied Europe during World War II, also became victims of the Nazi regime. Many, like female jazz artist Valaida Snow, were imprisoned in Axis internment camps for alien nationals. The artist Josef Nassy, living in Belgium, was arrested as an enemy alien and held for seven months in the Beverloo transit camp in German-occupied Belgium. He was later transferred to Germany, where he spent the rest of the war in the Laufen internment camp and its subcamp, Tittmoning, both in Upper Bavaria.


European and American blacks were also interned in the Nazi concentration camp system. Lionel Romney, a sailor in the U.S. Merchant Marine, was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Jean Marcel Nicolas, a Haitian national, was incarcerated in the Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau concentration camps in Germany. Jean Voste, an African Belgian, was incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp. Bayume Mohamed Hussein from Tanganyika (today Tanzania) died in the Sachsenhausen camp, near Berlin.


Black prisoners of war faced illegal incarceration and mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis, who did not uphold the regulations imposed by the Geneva Convention (international agreement on the conduct of war and the treatment of wounded and captured soldiers). Lieutenant Darwin Nichols, an African American pilot, was incarcerated in a Gestapo prison in Butzbach. Black soldiers of the American, French, and British armies were worked to death on construction projects or died as a result of mistreatment in concentration or prisoner-of-war camps. Others were never even incarcerated, but were instead immediately killed by the SS or Gestapo.


Some African American members of the U.S. Armed forces were liberators and witnesses to Nazi atrocities. The 761st Tank Battalion (an all-African American tank unit), attached to the 71st Infantry Division, U.S. Third Army, under the command of General George Patton, participated in the liberation of Gunskirchen, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, in May 1945.

The fate of black people from 1933 to 1945 in Nazi Germany and in German-occupied territories ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality, and murder. However, there was no systematic program for their elimination as there was for Jews and other groups.


After World War I, the Allies stripped Germany of its African colonies. The German military stationed in Africa (Schutztruppen), as well as missionaries, colonial bureaucrats, and settlers, returned to Germany and took with them their racist attitudes. Separation of whites and blacks was mandated by the Reichstag (German parliament), which enacted a law against mixed marriages in the African colonies.

Following World War I and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the victorious Allies occupied the Rhineland in western Germany. The use of French colonial troops, some of whom were black, in these occupation forces exacerbated anti-black racism in Germany. Racist propaganda against black soldiers depicted them as rapists of German women and carriers of venereal and other diseases. The children of black soldiers and German women were called “Rhineland Bastards.” The Nazis, at the time a small political movement, viewed them as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler charged that “the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardization.”

African German mulatto children were marginalized in German society, isolated socially and economically, and not allowed to attend university. Racial discrimination prohibited them from seeking most jobs, including service in the military. With the Nazi rise to power they became a target of racial and population policy. By 1937, the Gestapo (German secret state police) had secretly rounded up and forcibly sterilized many of them. Some were subjected to medical experiments; others mysteriously “disappeared.”

The racist nature of Adolf Hitler's regime was disguised briefly during the Olympic Games in Berlin in August 1936, when Hitler allowed 18 African American athletes to compete for the U.S. team. However, permission to compete was granted by the International Olympic Committee and not by the host country.

Holocaust

TARGETED GROUPS


The Nazis defined Jews as a “race.” Regarding the Jewish religion as irrelevant, the Nazis attributed a wide variety of negative stereotypes about Jews and “Jewish” behavior to an unchanging biologically determined heritage that drove the “Jewish race,” like other races, to struggle to survive by expansion at the expense of other races.

While it classified Jews as the priority “enemy,” the Nazi ideological concept of race targeted other groups for persecution, imprisonment, and annihilation, including Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Afro-Germans. The Nazis also identified political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and so-called asocials as enemies and security risks either because they consciously opposed the Nazi regime or some aspect of their behavior did not fit Nazi perceptions of social norms. They sought to eliminate domestic non-conformists and so-called racial threats through a perpetual self-purge of German society.


The Nazis believed that superior races had not just the right but the obligation to subdue and even exterminate inferior ones. They believed that this struggle of races was consistent with the law of nature. The Nazis pursued a strategic vision of a dominant German race ruling subject peoples, especially the Slavs and the so-called Asiatics (by which they meant the peoples of Soviet Central Asia and the Muslim populations of the Caucasus region), whom they judged to be innately inferior. For purposes of propaganda, the Nazis often framed this strategic vision in terms of a crusade to save western civilization from these “eastern” or “Asiatic” barbarians and their Jewish leaders and organizers.

THE RACIALLY DEFINED COLLECTIVE

For Hitler and other leaders of Nazi movement, the ultimate value of a human being lay not in his or her individuality, but in his or her membership in a racially defined collective group. The ultimate purpose of a racial collective was to ensure its own survival. Most people would agree that humans have an individual instinct for survival, but Hitler went on to assume a collective instinct for survival centered on membership in a group, a people, or a race (using these terms interchangeably). For the Nazis, this collective instinct for survival always involved safeguarding the purity of the “race” and the struggle with competing “races” for territory.

Maintaining race purity was important, according to Hitler and others, because mixing with other races would over time led to bastardization and degeneration of a race to the point where it lost its distinguishing characteristics and, in effect, lost the capacity to effectively defend itself, thus becoming doomed to extinction. Territory was vital, Hitler insisted, because the expanding population of a race required it. Without new territory to support an expanding population, Hitler believed the race would ultimately stagnate and face eventual disappearance.

The Nazis also postulated the idea of a qualitative hierarchy of races, in which not all races were equal. Hitler believed that Germans were members of a superior group of races that he called “Aryan.” The German “Aryan” race was gifted above all other races, Hitler asserted, with this biological superiority destining the Germans to rule a vast empire across Eastern Europe.

THE "ARYAN" RACE
But, Hitler warned, the German “Aryan” race was threatened by dissolution from within and without. The internal threat lurked in intermarriages between “Aryan” Germans and members of inherently inferior races: Jews, Roma, Africans, and Slavs. The offspring of these marriages were said to dilute the superior characteristics reflected in German blood, thus weakening the race in its struggle against other races for survival.

The interwar German state further weakened the German “Aryan” race by tolerating procreation among people whom the Nazis considered genetically degenerate and a harmful influence on the hygiene of the race as a whole: people with physical and mental disabilities, habitual or career criminals, and persons who compulsively engaged in socially “deviant behavior” as the Nazis perceived it, including homeless people, allegedly promiscuous women, people unable to hold a job, or alcoholics, among others.

The German “Aryan” race was also threatened with dissolution from without, because, according to Hitler, the Weimar Republic was losing the competition for land and population to the “inferior” Slavic and Asiatic races. In this competition, the “Jewish race” had refined its traditional Socialist tool -- Soviet communism -- to mobilize the otherwise incapable Slavs and to deceive Germans into thinking that the artificial device of class conflict overrode the natural instinct of racial struggle. Hitler believed that the lack of living space suppressed the birthrate among Germans to dangerously low levels. To make matters worse, Germany had lost World War I and had been forced by the Treaty of Versailles to give up thousands of miles of valuable land to its neighbors.

To survive, Hitler contended, Germany must break the encirclement of the country by its enemies and conquer vast territories in the east from the Slavs. The conquest of the east would provide Germany with the space required to vastly expand its population, with the resources to feed that population, and with the means to realize the biological destiny of being a master race with the appropriate status of a world power.

ELIMINATION OF RACIAL ENEMIES

Hitler and the Nazi party outlined their racial enemies in clear and unequivocal terms. For Hitler and the Nazis, the Jews represented a priority enemy both within and outside Germany. Their allegedly racial and inferior genetic makeup spawned the exploitative systems of capitalism and communism. In their drive to expand, the Jews promoted and used these systems of government and state organization, including constitutions, proclamations of equal rights, and international peace, to undermine the race-consciousness of superior races -- like the German race -- and to make possible the dilution of superior blood through assimilation and intermarriage.

The Jews used tools which were under their control or subject to their manipulation -- the media, parliamentary democracy with its stress on individual rights, and international organizations dedicated to peaceful reconciliation of national conflicts -- to advance their biologically driven expansion to world power. If Germany did not act decisively against the Jews both at home and abroad, Hitler contended, the hordes of subhuman, uncivilized Slavs and Asiatics that the Jews could mobilize would sweep away the “Aryan” German race.


For Hitler, government intervention to segregate the races, to promote the reproduction of those with the “best” characteristics, to prevent the reproduction of those with inferior characteristics, and to prepare for wars of expansion brought the German nation in line with its natural, biologically determined instinct to survive. In addition it fostered a “natural” race consciousness among the German people, a consciousness that the Jews sought to suppress through parliamentary democracy, international agreements on cooperation, and class conflict. By virtue of their racial superiority, Germans had the right and the duty, Hitler believed, to seize territory in the east from Slavs, “Asiatics,” and their Jewish puppet masters. By pursuing these aims, Hitler insisted, Germans followed their own natural instincts. To defeat and dominate the Slavs permanently, the German masters had to annihilate the leadership classes of the region and the Jews, who were the only “race” capable of organizing the inferior races through a brutalizing Bolshevik-Communist doctrine that was a biologically fixed “Jewish” ideology.

To eliminate this pernicious doctrine, dangerous to German survival, one had to eliminate the people who were by nature its standard-bearers. Hitler believed that this was the way nature worked. In the end, Hitler's program of war and genocide stemmed from what he saw as an equation: "Aryan" Germans would have to expand and dominate, a process requiring the elimination of all racial threats -- especially the Jews -- or else they would face extinction themselves.

I was overwhelmed with the sentiment of the Holocause Museum

As in increased anger... racism, superiority, greed, hatred, viciousness....
None of these aspects were new to me as a Black American.   But I did learn the years, dates, places, meaning of names and ships and people.....


The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program.



As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people. Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these individuals worked and often died under deplorable conditions. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.

In the early years of the Nazi regime, the National Socialist government established concentration camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor camps, both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in German-occupied territory, for non-Jews whose labor the Germans sought to exploit.


Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and, later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials, moved behind German lines to carry out mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. German SS and police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, as well as prisoners en route by forced march from one camp to another. The marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. For the western Allies, World War II officially ended in Europe on the next day, May 8 (V-E Day), while Soviet forces announced their “Victory Day” on May 9, 1945.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in displaced persons (DP) camps administered by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jewish DPs emigrated to the United States and other nations. The last DP camp closed in 1957. The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated most European Jewish communities and eliminated hundreds of Jewish communities in occupied eastern Europe entirely.


Further Reading
Bergen, Doris. War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003 Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1986. Gutman, Israel, editor. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Black woman speaks on Tilikum

Here's a quote...." ... was quick to put up a call to action on its Web site asking for a boycott of all aquariums and whale and dolphin shows. The site notes it has "long been asking SeaWorld to stop taking wild, ocean-going mammals from their families and ocean homes and confining them with no semblance of a life to an area that, to them, is the size of a bathtub."


I am truly a woman of color --- and my perspective??   Does this sound anything like the ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN?   Always acting outside of God's intended purpose of a people or an animal...   and WHY.... Money / profit driven.....

Say I'm crazy of off-base if you want to.....

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

"Love is a won’erful thing. A mother al’ays loves her chillun. Don’t care whut dey do. Dey may do ‘rong but it’s still her chile. Den dere is de love uv’ va ‘oman fer her man, but it ain’t nut’in lack a mother’s love fer her chillun. I loves a man when he treats me right but I ain’t never had no graveyard love fer no man...."


- Sarah Fitzpatrick, former slave, 1938

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

A Ship called COMFORT!

bed capacity: In casualty receiving, I have 50 beds," said Lieutenant Commander Dan D'Aurora, the Division Officer for Casualty Receiving on the USNS Comfort. "We've got 12 operating rooms; we've got 20 recovery beds. We have 80 intensive care beds, 400 intermediate care and 500 minimal care."





"This is essentially a hospital within a ship," he said. "In other words, they took a supertanker into the drydock, they hollowed it out like a canoe and dropped in the hospital, plain and simple."

A hospital that is now staffed by more than 550 medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and a variety of surgeons. They boarded the ship in the port of Baltimore Friday evening, arriving there on short notice from across the United States. Now, they are cruising toward Haiti at speeds of up to 24 kilometers per hour.

Ship pulled out of Baltimore, MD....  will probably be there six months!!! YEAH
Just so proud of my USA....


aid and benefits of a nearly $1 billion globally -- doctors and troops to the impoverished Caribbean nation. The U.S. Navy's floating hospital, USNS Comfort, dropped anchor TODAY -- day eight?? 550 medical staff, joining teams from about 30 other countries trying to treat the injured. Helping Haiti - my people!

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A successful Slave Revolt


Haiti was created in 1804, the product of Toussaint Louverture’s and Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ successful slave revolt against the French. Illiterate Haitian peasants defeated Europe’s most advanced army through discipline and communal sacrifice. They repelled 50,000 French troops sent by Napoleon to preserve for France the “Pearl of the Antilles,” whose annual production of coffee and sugar had supplied all of Europe throughout the 18th century. Denied this lucrative supply post, Napoleon sold off Louisiana to U.S. President Jefferson: and thus, the territory of the United States was doubled thanks to the impertinent slaves of one-third of a smallish Caribbean island!

Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois and William Faulkner all had links with and a fascination for the dark courage of this determined people — Douglass was Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Haiti and Dubois had family roots on the island, and Haiti and its people figured in William Faulkner’s novel, Absalom, Absalom. Even the Haitians’ opponents were charmed. A contingent of Polish conscripts under Napoleon’s ill-fated General Leclerc defected, and fought side by side with slaves who knew they faced either slavery, freedom, or death, yet chose freedom and the risk of death rather than submission. Much, much later, even under the opportunistic and cruel regime of Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) at the height of the Cold War, the Haitian government welcomed Polish citizens without visas as an expression of undying gratitude. Blue-eyed Haitians can still be found in the southwestern region of the country.

After Columbus’ first voyage to the present site of Cape Haitian, Queen Isabela of Spain asked him to describe the land he called “Hispaniola.” According to legend he took a sheet of paper, crumpled it in his hand and placed it on a table before the Queen, to describe its rugged and mountainous landscape. The land has been Haiti’s blessing and its curse ever since: it was the most fertile and productive land in the world in the 18th century, yet is now a partial wasteland of deforested hills. Today hunger and poverty prevail. In the marketplaces shopkeepers peddle a hamburger-shaped comestible made of clay and sugar, made to “deceive hunger” for citizens in one of the world’s hungriest and most densely populated countries.

Mountains beyond mountains....

The mountainous terrain —“Deye mon, gen mon” (beyond the mountains, more mountains) — has isolated the different parts of the country from each other, retarding true nation-building. The geographical barriers are compounded by the local Creole language, which, while expressive and colorful, cuts off the citizenry from world markets and culture.


When the French colonists brought thousands of Africans in chains to Haiti, the only interest they had in those slaves was their muscle power. They did nothing to educate them. Slave owners even tried to prohibit their slaves from learning to read and write. Then the unthinkable happened. In 1791 a slave revolt broke out in northern Haiti. Napoleon's armies could not quell it. Ten years of bloody struggle followed. Finally, the slaves forced their French masters to withdraw, climaxing the first successful slave rebellion in history. They were, however, a nation of illiterates.


While the Haitians won their political independence, they remained culturally tied to France. Only a tiny minority of Haitians ever mastered the French language. Still, French language and culture were placed on a pedestal. If you craved social status, you had to speak French. Haitians who spoke only Creole, an oral language, were looked down upon. Such cultural and linguistic snobbery created a tiny elite who knew French. The masses who spoke only Creole remained illiterate. Until the middle of this century, no one bothered to put Creole in written form. Only when a Methodist missionary turned oral Creole into a written language did the literacy door finally begin to creak open for Haiti.

Almost every one of Haiti's constitutions has decreed compulsory education. Unfortunately, the government has never found the money to carry out that mandate. In addition, Haiti's chief religion, voodoo, has no sacred book. Thus it does not provide a stimulus either to learn to read or to produce printed material in Haitian's heart language. How different from Christianity, whose converts hunger to learn to read from God's Book!

Not being able to read gives you a kind of blindness. You may have eyes, but your brain cannot interpret what you see on the printed page. As far as comprehending, you may as well be blind. Unless you can read, you are walled off from technological advances, from important health and medical advice, from agricultural breakthroughs. Even God's written Word has no power for you unless someone reads it aloud to you.

From a Nazarene article....

http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/linking.htm...... Haiti as our "Exhibit A." This small nation lies just east of Cuba on the western third of a mountainous island called Hispaniola. It was this island that Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492.


Spanish settlers followed Columbus to Hispaniola. They tried enslaving the native Arawak Indians. As you might expect, some of the Indians resisted losing their freedom. They were slaughtered on the spot. The rest of their fellow tribesmen began dying from gross maltreatment. From the first page of Haiti's modern history thus oozes the ruthlessness that Romans 1:31 associates with godless human beings.

Things did not improve in Haiti. French pirates arrived, hiding in coastal coves. Some started plantations of sugar, coffee, cocoa, indigo, and cotton. Plantations needed lots of cheap labor. By then the Indians had all died. So these Frenchmen headed for Africa to recruit workers at gunpoint. At the height of the West Indies slave trade, more than 700 ships regularly crisscrossed the Atlantic. Their cargo? Chained human beings. For thousands of Africans, a tropical paradise dissolved into a living hell.

In the late 1700s those slaves successfully revolted against their French masters. Tragically, even liberty from colonial masters did not stop the bloodshed. Repeated periods of civil unrest, brutal kings, and cruel dictators led one American couple to write a history of Haiti called Written in Blood. Another author poignantly says that Haiti is a country "whose soil has drunk more blood than sweat."

A lot of reading on Haiti History

James Theodore Holly, a Black American who was the first Episcopal bishop of Haiti, once called that Caribbean island nation: "the Mary Magdalene of the nations, possessed by seven devils."1 Among the devils which Holly went on to enumerate was voodoo, that syncretistic religion practiced by about ninety percent of the Haitians. His negative evaluation of voodoo's contribution to Haiti echoes that of several other writers.


Monday, January 11, 2010

Free Digital Publication

The January 2010 Edition of Shades of the Departed has been published.  There are twelve articles--including a dreadfully good piece of fiction--written by a variety of family historians and family archivists, all edited by our friend, the footnoteMaven.
ancestories1.blogspot.com

All I have to do is

Just Keep on Livin.....    and there will always be a story to tell.   Race, culture, our environment..... It's always revealing.  

I noticed Sunday night, Senator Reid . . .negative remarks... he's forgiven by Obama.....

what's up??? 


To get ahead of myself......     my word for the day is

racial animus......people who hold a racial animus toward Obama



an-i-mus    –noun


1. strong dislike or enmity; hostile attitude; animosity.


Former Rep. Harold Ford said "I don't believe in any way Harry Reid --- DEMOCRAT FROM NEVADA --- had any racial animus. I think there's an important distinction between he and Trent Lott."

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The Words of MLK

BLACKS IN AMERICA (From Birmingham jail, 1963): "Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands."